Undergraduate Introduction to Syntax (Lectures, Spring 2026)

I will use this blog post to distribute my lectures for 'Grammatical Analysis I' which is the undergraduate introduction to syntax at NYU. This course uses Merge as a pedagogical tool to teach students the basics of syntax. I will try to post all my weakly lectures here this year.

Syllabus

Lecture 1

Lecture 2

Lecture 3

Being a Syntactician (Some Preliminary Posts)

I am trying to convey to a non-linguist audience what it means to be a syntactician. The goal is to write something completely non-technical that nevertheless gives the reader with absolutely no background a pretty good idea of what we do when we do syntax. I have written several blog posts on this topic already, which I list below. But I am interested in writing something more substantive. So consider these posts as a kind of scratch pad with my notes. The first and the third posts are a bit redundant.

The Personality of a Syntactician (December 24, 2025)

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-personality-of-syntactician.html)

Thinking Syntactically (for Non-Linguists) (September 18 2025)

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2025/09/thinking-syntactically.html)

You Know You are a Syntactician When (April 17, 2017)

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2017/04/this-was-originally-posted-march-31.html)

What Kind of Syntactician are You? (March 25, 2017)

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2017/03/what-kind-of-syntactician-are-you.html)

Some Challenging Issues in Teaching Graduate Level Syntax

1. Grad: Does X (a hypothesis) really work? My professor as an undergrad said it does not. I agree with them.

Implication: Everything I learned at previously as an undergraduate (or Masters student) needs to be rigorously and systematically disproven before I will accept anything else.

Response: I call this phenomenon ‘imprinting’. Whatever theory a student first learns, they take that is the right theory. As a graduate student, you should consider what you have already learned to be a preliminary step, not the final word set in stone. It is likely that most things that you have learned will need to be revised or replaced in some way. Try to have an open mind!

2. Grad: I do not agree with those acceptability judgments. So my English is not characterized by the relevant principle. 

Implication: If I do not agree with the data, I am not going to read any papers on the subject, or look into it. And if you bring up that principle again, I will not fail to remind you that my judgments do not conform to it. In my opinion, it is a total waste of time.

Response: Acceptability judgements are complicated. Even if you disagree with them, it is worthwhile finding out what the range of judgments is, and how that range can be accounted for. Nowadays, it is also possible to explore acceptability judgements experimentally.

3. Grad: Is X a consensus point of view? How many people adopt it?

Implication: Please, I just want to know the most popular theory, the one most people accept. That is the one I want to use to write my paper, so I can get abstracts accepted at conferences.

Response: Consensus has nothing to do with truth. If society in general believes the sun revolves around the earth, that does not thereby make it true. For many issues (e.g., obligatory control, head movement, case) there are several approaches, and understanding those approaches is an important part of learning the subject matter, and making scientific progress on the issues.

4. Grad: Do we really need syntax to explain X? It could just be semantics, right?

Implication: Even without formulating any alternative analysis, we should just take it as a null hypothesis that an explanation not involving any syntactic principle is preferable. 

Response: Neither a syntactic nor semantic analysis can be taken as the null hypothesis. Every hypothesis must be argued for with the same rigor. Disentangling alternative analyses can be quite difficult, and takes a lot of effort.

5. Grad: I thought of an interesting idea, but I already see a paper about that topic published in LI. Oh well, somebody has beaten me to it. I will look for a different topic.

Implication: What makes an idea interesting to me is that I thought of it first. If somebody else has also thought of it, I am no longer interested.

Response: Doing research is engaging in a process involving lots of different people looking at topics from different angles. Your contribution to a particular topic might be completely different from what is already out there. You should try to develop your own ideas, even if there are other papers published on the topic.

6. Grad: I just thought of some interesting data. Let me search the internet intensely for a few days (or even weeks) to see if anything interesting has been written on it.

Implication: I need to find a model in the syntax literature, and apply that to my data. That is the way to do research.

Response: You should get used to doing these things on your own, without always having the crutch of somebody else’s analysis. Sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, and write! Of course, at some step in the process of doing research you need to add references, and a discussion of other approaches.

Inversion Seminar: The Scope of Inversion in English (Spring 2026)

Inversion Seminar

January 20th, 2026

Lecture 1:

I. Overview of Inversion in English

II. Analyses of Quotative Inversion

III. Presentatives as Inversion (contra Wood and Zanuttini 2023)

Lecture (January 20th, 2026)

Where are they now? (written for Peace Corps Togo)

Where Are They Now?

Chris Collins, January 14, 2026

1. Where did you serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer?

I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo from 1985 to 1987. I taught math at the Lycée level, for one year in Notsé and then for a second year in Danyi-Apéyémé.

2. What are you doing now (professionally or personally)?

I am professor of linguistics at New York University. My research interests include linguistic fieldwork in Africa. In particular, I study Ewe, a language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin.

3. How did your Peace Corps Togo experience prepare you for success in your current role or life path? 

My Peace Corps experience laid the foundation for my career as a linguist doing fieldwork in Africa. I learned to speak Ewe, which I have continued working on for my whole career.

If you are curious, here is a picture of my cohort in the Peace Corps:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2021/04/peace-corps-togo-1985.html

Here is a summary of my career:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2024/11/biographical-notes-technology-review.html#more

Here are some notes on my recent trip to Togo (summer 2025):

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2025/06/togo-diary-june-july-2025.html#more

4. What is one skill or lesson from service that you still use today?

The Peace Corps taught me basic life skills about working in a foreign country and thinking outside of the box in order to get things done. I also learned to appreciate the people of Togo who showed me so much support, even when their lives were materially much more difficult than mine.

Some other smaller skills are listed here:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2019/10/ten-things-i-learned-in-peace-corps.html

5. Any advice you’d give to current or future Volunteers?

Your time in Togo might be the most interesting and intense period in your entire life. Keep a journal, and send regular letters home. You will love to look back at them later. 

Syllabus: Inversion Seminar, Spring 2026 (near final draft)

Course Description

Collins and Branigan 1997 (see also Collins 1997) inaugurated the study of quotative inversion into generative syntax. In the interim, there have been many studies engaging with various aspects of their analysis in different languages, including Alexiadou and Anagnostopolou 2001, 2007, Branigan 2011, Bruening 2016, Gärtner and Gyuris 2014, Matos 2013, Murphy 2022, Richards 2010, Suñer 2000, Storment 2024, 2025a, de Vries 2006, amongst others.

This course will review the existing literature on quotative inversion, and explore a new analysis in the framework of Collins 2024 (‘Principles of Argument Structure’ MIT Press, Cambridge) taking into account the insights of previous work.

Along the way, we will discuss the relation of quotative inversion to other inversion constructions. The choice of topics will depend on the interests of the participants.  Some possible topics include (but are not limited to): predicate inversion in copular constructions, subject-object inversion in Bantu, locative inversion in Bantu, French stylistic inversion, presentatives (“Here comes John!”), Austronesian VSO and VOS word order, Austronesian voice systems, Heavy XP Shift, there-expletive constructions, the dative alternation, and related inversion phenomena from a cross-linguistic perspective.

Seminar Syllabus

The Personality of a Syntactician

I have written this blog post to highlight some personality traits of syntacticians (Ordinary Working Grammarians). It is meant for both linguists and non-linguists.

You know you are a syntactician when….

1.

You are talking to somebody, but start to drift off because they just produced an interesting sentence.

2.

After explaining the fine points of Spanish grammar to your friend, they are surprised to learn that you do not speak a single word of it.

3.

You try to steer the conversation in the direction of interesting syntactic constructions, and your friends and family roll their eyes and snicker, saying ‘Here we go again!’

4.

You obsess over an interesting new sentence you have just noticed, even losing sleep.

5.

You tend to gravitate towards being with other syntacticians, with whom you can discuss ‘cool facts’.

6.

You pester your friends and family by asking for grammaticality judgments, even your own children.

7.

When reading a novel, you sometimes stop in the middle of a page to think about the structure of sentences. 

8.

You love to talk to foreigners because of the interesting grammatical patterns in their speech.

9.

You view your knowledge of English as your own personal syntactic database.